I decided to stretch my brain this semester by doing all the programming and scratchwork for the course I'm taking in Ruby.

My main disappointments in Ruby so far have been the lack of autovivification in multi-dimensional arrays (doing dynamic programming without it is a PITA) and the available documentation not meeting my expectations.

I've subscribed to the "Ruby" tag in del.icio.us, but the S/N is swamped by Rails hype. Ruby does make me appreciate the "Huffman coding" of Perl. Haven't bothered with threads so far as they're not necessary to the problem domain.

I spent some time using Ruby last year. Bought the Pickaxe too. Ruby is definitely a nice language, but it's problem is not just that it's lacking in docs, but that it's lacking in commitment to docs. The Pickaxe is a pretty good book, granted. But I got the impression that the core Ruby people just aren't all that committed to making sure they have great docs. It's just not a priority for them, and that's fine -- that's their choice. And it's understood that they've got a lot on their plate.

After spending a few months with Ruby, then coming back to Perl, one of the first things I immediately noticed was, "Wow, I almost forgot how darn *good* the Perl docs are." (the other thing I said to myself was, "Wow, I almost forgot how *vast* the CPAN is" -- but that's is beside the point, since Ruby is still young).

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other